Thursday, 2 August 2012

Nae Skinking Ware

When Robert Burns bought a mare,
he called her Jenny Geddes, in honour of the stool-casting Edinburgh virago. He
described his horse as his ‘Pegasean Pride’ in his poem ‘Epistle To Hugh
Parker’, and, in a letter to James Smith dated June 30th 1787,
as ‘…one of the Rosinante family,’ (Rosinante was Don Quixote’s mount).
Burns is the polar opposite of Edmund Spenser in my personal pantheon of
heroes. I started off hating him, viewing him, as Jeremy Paxman once described
him, as the ‘King of Sentimental Doggerel’, what with his pony-tail,
free-masonry and philandering (…an estimated thirteen children by four
different women) – all shortbread and tartan - but the more I read, the more I
liked him. Robert (never, ever Rabbie. He did call himself variously
Robin, Rab, Rab Mossgiel, Rab the Rhymer, Robert and in his formal letters he
often signed them Robt. All that Rabbie nonsense is one of the reasons I
didn’t like him – I was so pleased to discover it is a modern affectation);
Robert Burns was born into poverty in Ayrshire, Scotland, in 1759.

Robert Burns

What little
education he had was largely from his father, and much of his youth was spent
as a farm labourer, which later led to the sentimentalising Edinburgh literati
to describe him as a ‘heaven-taught ploughman’, but Burns was pragmatic
about the prospects of fame and fortune–

“' When proud fortune's ebbing
tide recedes,' you will bear me witness, that when my bubble of fame was at the
highest, I stood unintoxicated with the inebriating cup in my hand, looking
forward with rueful resolve.”

(Letter to Mrs Dunlop, January 15th
1787).

'When proud fortune's ebbing tide recedes,' is a quotation from
William Shenstone’s Elegy VII (He Describes His Vision to an Acquaintance);
Shenstone was one of the earliest influences on Burns’s poetry, and remained
one of his favourites throughout his life; he was also, by the way, the first
person to use the word ‘floccinaucinihilipilification’ in writing,

“I loved him
for nothing so much as his flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication of money”.

Shenstone 1741
in Works Vol. 3 (1791) Let. xxii.

Shenstone - Works Vol 3 (1791) Letter xxii

Floccinaucinihilipilification is the longest,
non-technical word in English (it is one letter longer than
antidisestablishmentarianism) and means – ‘the act or habit of
describing or regarding something as unimportant, of having no value or being
worthless.’

One of Burns’s best known works, due in part to its being
recited at every Burns Night Supper worldwide, is To a Haggis.

“Fair
fa' your honest, sonsie face.

Great chieftain 0' the puddin-race!

Aboon them a'
ye tak your place, - painch, tripe, or thairm:

Weel are ye wordy o' a grace - as
lang's my arm."

The Scots comedian Fred MacAulay told the story on QI
that a friend of his had the poem translated into German for a Burns Night
Supper there, and when the poem was translated back, the line ‘Great
Chieftain of the Pudding Race’ was rendered as ‘Mighty Führer of the
sausage people!’

Haggis

The first recorded recipe in English for Haggis comes from
Lancashire and not, as you may expect, Scotland. From about 1430, the Liber
Cure Cocorum is written in Middle English in the dialect of North-West
Lancashire, and the recipes are presented in verse form (possibly as a mnemonic
device, to help the cook remember them).The recipe for Hagese (Haggis) reads: -

Haggis of a sheep. Take the ropes
[intestines] and the tallow [fat, suet] and parboil then, then hack [chop] them
small; grind pepper and saffron and bread and yolks of eggs and raw cream or
sweet milk: do all together, and do [put] in the great womb of the sheep, that
is the maw [stomach] and then seeth [boil] them and serve forth at once.

Hagws of a schepe c. 1450

A pudding made from the pluck
(heart, liver and lungs) of an animal was nothing new however. The Romans made
them from the innards of pigs, although the pluck was finely minced and mixed
with fruit before being stuffed into the intestines.

Homer Odyssey Book XX

In Book XX of the Odyssey,
Homer describes Odysseus as being in a tumultuous state like a ‘… paunch filled
with fat and blood, ready to be cooked quickly, he rolled hither and thither.’
Which may be haggis or may be black
pudding.